from the garage to garage band – a long road

hello fellow travellers,

 

just checking in before 2016 gives way to 2017, I have been quite preoccupied of late with my new guitar system, I’m building three pedalboards at the moment, and I am in the middle of creating 200 MIDI presets to call up an enormous range of ordinary, unusual, and ambient guitar sounds – from massive distortion (as in, Crush Station and Sculpt) to beautiful modulations to amazing delays to gorgeous reverbs (thanks to Space) or incredible combinations of delay, echo, repeat, and reverb (as in SpaceTime, Ultratap, and Resonator – three amazing H9 modules) so instead of uploading tracks and writing blogs and putting items up on Twitter – instead of any of that, for something like the last two or three months now, I’ve been slowly working out the way these three boards should work.

I have, in an attempt to at least release something for the New Year, I’ve uploaded two completed tracks to the new “music for apps: garage band – an eternal album” record and they are a couple of really interesting pieces – the first one, “preponderance”, is eight minutes plus of something so strange, involving so many interesting sounds and loops, and musical events, that I find it almost impossible to describe.  the best thing is to give it a listen, it’s quite unusual.

the second song is much shorter, and features a strange, dissonant bass line that I actually played on my iphone, on the Apple “McCartney” style bass interface, and then looped in Garageband – and then, I proceeded to create an entire song, entitled “demonstrations of affliction” (in honour of Bill Nelson’s “Demonstrations Of Affection” – of course!) over the top of this very strange and repetitive bass line.  But – it’s interesting, and I look at “what works” with what in a slightly different way after this experience.  there are times when the bass loop clashes loudly and horribly with the overdubs, but, I do insist – it’s SUPPOSED to be that way!  Really, it is.

these two pieces brought me a lot of joy in their creation, and there are two or three more that I’ve been working on that are not quite ready for prime time – but, once I’ve finished those – I will put them up, I am really enjoying the “garage band experiments”.

now – back to what is important – these crazy pedalboards.

 

why are there three? – well, because that’s what works for me.  everyone does pedalboards differently – I want three, but, the three work together to form one giant system.  and that is actually really awesome!

so the first board, is for non-MIDI stompboxes, such as, pitch, distortion, overdrive, EQ pedals.  that’s a small board, with perhaps, 8 or 9 devices – and, it can be used standalone for practice or rehearsal, or for very small gigs where you don’t want to haul all of the equipment.  this board is known as the “Input Board” – this is where the guitar signal starts.

then – there is the MAIN board, which is for MIDI-controlled stompboxes.  This is where my Eventide devices live, along with their dedicated power supply and a MIDI splitter and cables.  this is where the magic happens, by combining different patches across the H9s, or using the Pitch Factor and Space stomps to provide harmony and … space…the possibilities here are staggering.  so this is the heart of the system.  The output of the Input Board, plugs into the Input of the Main Board…so I drive the non-MIDI effects into the MIDI controlled effects.

finally – pedalboard three – is the “Control Board” – this is the simplest of the boards, it contains a large MIDI pedal, that can be programmed to call up all of the different patches on the five devices.  Along with that, are two expression pedals, which are used to alter different parameters on different effects, you know, like the speeding up and slowing down of a leslie speaker simulator, or increasing the spaces between the beats on a tremolo and so on….plus a third expression pedal to operate a stand-alone non-MIDI delay that I use (exclusively) for reverse guitar sounds.

yes, I could have got reverse guitar sounds from the H9s (and I do, actually) but I wanted to free up a bank – so by adding the delay, that means, I freed an entire bank that had been dedicated to reverse sounds.  so I am much happier this way, because I can now make any of the 200 patches – play in reverse.  That is brilliant!

 

but this is where this whole pedalboard building experience really amazes me…if I step back a moment in time, to when I was about 13, and I was in my first real band, and I had a no-name red semi-acoustic electric guitar, and I played through a single channel of a tiny amp, with another guitarist (the owner of the amp) plugged into the same channel of the one channel amp – I didn’t have an amp of my own, so I had to plug into one of the other guitarists’ amps!  That – was my “set up” in 1971.

I remember speaking with the drummer in the band, Brian Monaco, he and I were the main singers, so we solemnly both decided that we would each buy a Radio Shack best quality vocal microphone for something like $25.00 – which was a huge amount of money, and then we had to buy the mic stands, too…no boom for me, just the straight stand with the massive, heavy weights at the bottom.  Brian had the expensive stand with the boom, because he needed it – he was the drummer, after all.

We plugged both mics into one tiny guitar amp, and with the guitars all plugged in together in a way that you just should not do… and that was the bands’ set up.  Three tiny no name amplifiers, with three guitars and two microphones plugged into the six possible inputs – and all three amps were single channel, so the sound must have been terrible.  But – we didn’t notice – we just played.  Amazingly, there is a tape of that band, which you can find somewhere on this blog, in the “companion” to the blog – there are a few tracks from that gig posted.

So when I think back to that, and I then consider what my guitar system is like today, some forty plus years later – with my MIDI controlled presets (20o of them!) and the endless combinations of effects and sounds I can retreive with one button push – I can’t really believe this is happening, it doesn’t seem possible, but – it is.  I’ve just done my first sysex backup of the Ground Control Pro MIDI Pedal, which was very exciting.  It actually worked – which means I can back up and restore the entire contents of the MIDI pedal as needed – which is great!

I often wish that my “13 year old self” could just see my current 2016 set up, so he would know (have known) what the future held.

I remember when I was 15, I began to use guitar effects, first, I had a wah wah pedal that I bought myself, which was a great tool, and then later, a cast-off and not very good sounding Arbiter Fuzz Face, the old red one – which I now wish I still had! and then later still, I had the use of an Echoplex, which was simply an amazing tool, when I was something like 16 or 17.   If I could have seen where that was headed, to modern delays, loopers, and so on – I would have said “no way, this is simply not possible”…

My 13 year old self would not have believed what can be achieved with MIDI and guitars, it’s simply astonishing technology – and I was blissfully unaware of it until much, much later in life.  But I’m glad Ive gone through this, and I think that it’s better to have a good sounding guitar, with a range of different interesting patches, than just ONE GUITAR SOUND – always the same.  That does seem dull, and I know that as a guitarist, I should love the idea of plugging my strat into a tube amp, with NO pedals, and just wailing and waxing poetic with the pure sound of tubes – and yes, I do love that sound, but…not to the exclusion of all else.

 

I think effects are important, and I do spend a lot of time, trying to get them to sound as natural and as organic as possible, I want you to hear the guitar playing first and the effect, second – definitely. I don’t want to be defined by effects, but by my note choices and the songs I write and record and play.  So I do try to remember my roots, try to remember what it was like, always playing through a borrowed amp, for years, as a teenager, because I couldn’t afford an amp!

The truth is, the last time I even OWNED a tube amp, was at least ten years ago – no, at least 12 or 13 years ago (a beautiful small black MESA Boogie which I should NEVER have sold – SIGH!!) so perhaps someday, I will get into amps again.  I think in this day and age, using a high quality device such as the H9 for my main sounds – that I can do just as well (using only a pedalboard into a clean stereo power amp) as a tube amp and no one will really know the difference, – except other guitarists.

I have never hidden the fact that I love effects, and I mean, I have gone pedal mad, I read about pedals, I dream about pedals – and I think there are some truly wonderful pedals out there that can transform your playing and take your guitar sound into the realms of the beyond.  I’ve finally realised that that, is where I want to go.  Beyond.

 

 

We have the technology – so – why not?

If you see what I mean.

 

 

I must now return to programming, I am on bank D now, so, I have about 140 of the 200 presets entered.  Wish me luck on the rest…

 

ta

 

Dave at pureambient

 

 

Happy Very Belated Christmas and a Merry New Year to all !!!!

 

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studio diary – november / december 2014

The last several weeks have been more about getting equipment, computers, software and storage sorted out, than having a lot of time to actually play much music.  That is slowly changing, early this morning, I spent almost two hours playing and recording some beautiful sampled sounds in Kontakt, and it’s rare that I sit and play the keyboard for an hour and fifty minutes at one sitting!  I did capture a few interesting things, so I am hopeful that this long period of extended studio set-up, improvements, and testing, will also result in some new music along the way.

I’ve had more than my share of frustration with equipment; particularly, software and storage, but things are slowly sorting themselves out.  Hardware issues, software issues, strange computer behaviours – I’ve got it all.  But it is slowly getting better – all the time.  I solve one issue at a time, eventually, they will all get done.  Over the past two days, with a lot of assistance from my pal Ken Mistove, I have sorted out a number of long-standing issues in SONAR X3, and we have also made a number of improvements to how things work in the world of the music computer, external hard drives, and recording practices – big improvements, and things are running so much smoother, and better, already – which really pleases me, as I really just want to sit down and play music, not, troubleshoot for two hours, and then play for 10 minutes!

My attempts to film the Kaoss Guitar (the remarkable Ibanez RGPK6 electric guitar), well, on Sunday, November 30^th, I finally got some takes that were better than my original session from the previous week, November 23^rd; so we shall see, I’ve been going through the audio and video from the first session from the 23rd of November, and then I have to go through the miles of footage shot on 30th November as well.

I am hopeful that out of probably 25 takes between the two sessions, that there will be a handful of pieces that are worth making videos of.  It’s difficult to say, but I feel that some of the takes from the second session will yield video, I am less sure about the first session – besides being a bit under-rehearsed, I was still having a fair number of technical issues too, so I was not able to concentrate fully on the music.  So I may be forced to shelve the entire first session, although I believe that at least one of the final three takes from the 23rd may be good.  Time will tell.

Update: there are definitely some good takes from the 20141130 session, beginning with one almost-ambient-but-not-quite quiet track, entitled “just gone”, which is mixed and ready for video build now.

Then tonight, I mixed the next candidate, a remarkable distorted reverse guitar solo entitled “slicer” – so that’s two audio mixes ready for video. There are probably three or four more kaoss guitar trax to come from the second session, audio mixing continues this week, with video builds to begin soon as well. End update 🙂

The Kaoss guitar itself – is an absolute joy to play, I had really hoped to get some videos made and uploaded so you can hear and see it, but I’ve decided that it’s more important to take some time, and get some really interesting examples of what you can do with this innovative instrument.

The recording set up for the Kaoss guitar is very, very simple indeed, I am using my Line 6 DL-4 delay (either bypassed, or, to provide reverse guitar on demand) to provide a stereo out, so it’s the guitar into the DL-4, and then directly into the sound card, thus bypassing all of the outboard effects in the mixer – and for the first time, I am relying solely on Guitar Rig for guitar tone and for reverb / delay effects – since it’s a live performance anyway, I didn’t feel that I needed to use the outboard stuff, so I am keeping it really, really simple.

As part of Komplete, and just in general, I’ve been relying more heavily on Guitar Rig 5 for a lot of my guitar-oriented projects, which allows me to create complex rack mount simulations of many, many excellent effects, which I can play through when I record, but then, if I am not totally happy with the patch I have chosen for the live take, I can then “remove” that patch, and replace it with a different one (re-amping, in essence) until I feel happier – so I’ve also started saving my patches, taking stock patches and changing them radically, and then saving the results, so I can re-use them on other takes later.  I’ve never done a lot of re-amping because I considered it to be a bit too burdensome in the past, but with Guitar Rig – it’s a pleasure.  It’s quick and easy, and there is such a huge range of truly exceptional effects, that you can very quickly build up some really complex and wonderful sounds – the kind of guitar sounds that 30 years ago, I could only ever dream of, or, hear on a Jimi Hendrix album (such as, “Electric Ladyland” – my favourite).

In that first Nov. 23rd session, I had played through one Guitar Rig patch that was a bit too echo-y, too over the top, so later on, I re-mastered it; removed the original Guitar Rig sound I used for the live take, and replaced it with a different Guitar Rig sound (a customised sound created by and saved by myself), a much better sound (if I do say so myself!), and really, that saved the day – it made the performances sound so much better.

So I am currently working on both audio mixes, and video creation and mixes, from the two Kaoss guitar performances; as well as, I captured a large number of new improvs using Komplete and Kontakt last night, which I need to go through next! after the kaoss projects, and see what is there – some of them are surely going to be good – the system is performing so beautifully now, it’s an absolute joy to use – and that is reflected in the music that comes out, too.

I think audio mixing is my favourite of those activities, or in the case of the Kaoss Guitar takes, well for any and all live takes that are simply live to stereo – I should say, “audio mastering”, as you can’t really “mix” a live performance, unless it involves multiple instruments, which these do not.  So you just have to get the best stereo sound, make sure the track is normalised to the right level, be happy with your EQ and effects (re-amped or otherwise) and then – that is that!

I was so pleased with the results of the somewhat tentative and somewhat technically challenging first session, I had very little experience with the new Kaoss guitar, it’s quite a struggle to work out the very best way to play it, without sounding awkward, and slowly, I am gaining experience with it, to the point where on Sunday, November 30^th – I could almost make it do what I wanted 🙂 – almost, most of the time.  Sometimes – it’s still outwith my control.

I’ve also been shopping, what with all the sales on line – but not for the ordinary kinds of things that most people shop for at Christmas time – I’ve been buying samples.  During the past two months, I have added so much to my sample library, it’s just out of control, and this past week, I bought three amazing packages from my favourite software instrument maker, Soniccouture (http://www.soniccouture.com/en/products/) – I have a lot of these now, including the amazing Geosonics – sounds of the earth – field recordings adapted into music – astonishing stuff – at a huge savings, 50 percent off in total.  That was a short lived sale, but I am glad I acted – it was great to acquire all of those sounds for such a good price, I could not be more pleased:

1) “the conservatoire collection” – a collection of renaissance and baroque samples – very pricey, but you get things like baroque guitar, psaltery, flemish harpsichords, hurdy-gurdy and so on – fantastic one of a kind classical sounds.  I had an absolute blast using these instruments for the first time earlier today, and I can foresee a lot of interesting pieces forthcoming using this beautiful collection of antique sounds.

 

2) “glass works” – the sounds of various glass instruments, including a famous “cloud chamber bowls” instrument made by eccentric composer and instrument maker Harry Partch, I visited Partch’s studio when I was a teenager, on a school trip actually, and I actually played his original glass bowls instrument, so I am very excited to OWN those sounds! some of the pieces I recorded early this morning were made with the “cloud chamber bowls” instrument, and it sounded JUST as I remembered it – but perhaps even more stunning, is Soniccouture’s emulation of another of Partch’s unique glass instruments – the amazing “armonica”.  This instrument sounds like nothing on earth, like a weird combination of bowed glass, church organ and ethereal spaces – that’s as close as the English language will allow me at a very poor attempt to describe an incredibly beautiful sound!  Lovely beyond compare.

 

3) “ep 73 deconstructed” – this is the most intense, most detailed set of samples available for a 1973 fender rhodes electric piano – the kind my best pal Ted (RIP) used to use in our jam sessions back when I was about 18 years old – a great, classic sound, playing this vintage rhodes is a fantastic experience, it was literally, better than the real thing – and I could have easily sat and played it for hours on end – and, of course, it’s Soniccouture, so you get a lot of “extra” sounds, bowed, plucked, sound effects, and so on – variants on an already perfect set of electric piano samples – incredible attention to detail is Soniccouture’s watchword – the samples they create – are simply, the best.

However, best of all is this next item…

 

The final item in my “black Friday to Monday shopping spree” – based on Ken’s emailed link that simply said “HURRY!” – normally $200.00 I got it for $79.00 – one day only – it’s ADT from Waves Audio – a software “hardware emulation” where they take a classic piece of hardware equipment, and painstakingly re-create it in software.

In this case, “ADT” is, of course, “automatic double tracking” which was developed by one of the Beatles’ engineers, and it was used on classic Beatles albums from the late 1960s such as “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “The White Album” – this device used tape machines, that were slowed up and down to create a second, “doubled” track, it was basically built for John Lennon, who complained about having to double track his voice – he wanted a machine to do it for him.  So this guy, Ken Townshend, figured out a way to do this, using the existing technology of 1967 – which in itself is remarkable.

 

Even more remarkable is the fact that from ADT, a massive industry sprang, of doublers that are choruses or flangers; “Ken’s flanger” is what Lennon called the device, and the name has stuck – millions of “Flangers” have been sold since then, emulating this same “ancient” technique. While I have owned and do own a number of flangers and choruses, both hardware and software, this is the ORIGINAL, the one that started it all – and, I couldn’t own the original hardware, it only exists at Abbey Road Studios where it was designed, it’s not for sale, so having it as software, gives me the classic Beatles chorus and flanger sounds, WITHOUT tape machines and an impossible-to-buy-hardware item.  If that isn’t technological magic, I am not sure what is 🙂

 

So 2015 is going to be a very interesting year indeed, I have a plug in version of the “original” chorus/flanger plug in now, so I can apply “Beatles” flanging or chorus sounds to my guitar parts (think of the lead guitar break in “Fixing A Hole” from “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” – or Clapton’s solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” – what a sound!)  I will also be able to choose from a huge, huge range of samples, something I’ve never really had available in my first 40 years of music-making 🙂

 

I wish I had a time machine back when I was 16, if I could have travelled 40 years into the future, and been shown what my tiny, modest studio would look like, in that far distant future of the year 2015, from the vantage point of 1975 – I would a) not have believed you, that such a thing could be possible, and b) it would have seemed like witchcraft, magic – the samples, a kaoss pad guitar (or, a kaoss pad itself, for that matter!!), synthesizers that can reproduce real sounds, sampled sounds, (or, a synthesizer itself), ipads, app technology, all of it is strictly magical stuff if you go back forty years.  40 years ago, I was 16, and I was working with my good friend and fellow musician Ted Holding, who had some recording and mixing gear, but neither of us had any access to the kinds of tools and software instruments available now to me, and to all musicians, in the year 2015 – we would have been dumbstruck with amazement, we really would have!

At 15 or 16, my “technology” was a knock off or off brand electric guitar, played thru a hand me down Fuzz Face, a Cry Baby Wah pedal, and later on, a borrowed echoplex – the kind with tape loops in them, not the new echoplex pro – played thru a Carvin bass head and a home made speaker cabinet. The guitar and the wah pedal were mine, the rest, mostly stuff left lying around Ted’s studio (aka garage) or built or repaired by Ted. I played through that bass amp for like, three years, until I could afford to buy an amp of my own!! Of course, when we hit 18, 19 and 20 we did achieve some manner of technology, but it was still a far cry from what is available now.

Ted expanded his selection of instruments, adding Fender Rhodes, Hammond Organ, and an ARP Omni string machine. I had better guitars, and I brought over a reel to reel tape deck to use as the worlds cheapest tape delay unit, which I would reach over and switch on during a guitar solo, and it was the best and most authentic tape delay I’d ever used…because it was real, real tape, on a reel, running past tape heads with a delay introduced…it sounded amazing to us then.

40 years on, a modestly priced delay pedal such as a Line 6 DL-4, can emulate tape echo very similar to what I was doing back then, plus a myriad of amazing delay effects, all in a small green box…no need to lug around a massive Sony reel to reel tape recorder, but I didn’t own any kind of delay or reverb unit, and couldn’t afford the expensive delays of the day…so using the tape deck as a delay pedal, was a no brainier. We were all delighted, it really made my guitar sound good!

Sometimes even now, even though I’ve now been doing “digital music” for quite some time – since 2005 at least – I’m still just stunned when I walk into my studio and I open up the computer, and I see the tools arrayed there, at my fingertips, for music production.  It’s difficult to imagine how my young self would have reacted to the idea of having real instrument samples playable on demand, on a MIDI keyboard – disbelief, shock, astonishment – at the very least.  But – I am glad I’ve stuck with music, because now, the toolsets are very nearly unlimited, and this gives you choice – choice to create sound worlds that previously, you could only dream of…

I plan on doing a lot of musical dreaming in 2015, and right now, I am making a start – I can’t wait to master the pieces from this morning, and start sharing some of the magic of glass works or the ep 73 deconstructed electric piano or to my very first attempts at playing the hurdy-gurdy – remarkable.

 

A good “problem” to have, I suppose – spoiled for choice, where to begin?  At the beginning, of course!!!

 

 

D.

 

 

 

 

 

TC-11 – a touch-controlled synth for ipad that really delivers…

since acquiring a tablet device some time ago, I’ve tried a lot of ipad synths, and I am not ashamed to say I have a very large collection of them, that is still growing steadily – and probably always will! 🙂

they tend to fall into three broad classes:

• category one – those that work to emulate normal synthesizers, and therefore, their main method of producing notes and chords is a “virtual” keyboard;
• category two – those that use an alternate method to produce notes and chords – in a serious number of radical configurations, some more successful than others;
• category three – other less easily defined interfaces – oddball devices / devices that use truly unusual methods of triggering notes and chords;

so – in our first category (by far the most populated, from what I can tell) you have keyboard-based synths ranging from animoog to xenon, including classic emulations of moogs and korgs (such as the iMS-20 or the iPolysix), other standalones  such as addictive synth, alchemy, mini-synth pro or magellan, and second and third generation devices such as the amazing thor and the equally capable nave.

the second category is a mixed bag, with some good entrants, such as the strangely satisfying sound prism pro; then you have your cantors, your mugicians, and the like…they don’t have keys, but they have a single, straightforward way of producing notes and chords.  but that is also their drawback – they only have one screen pattern, regardless how innovative.

and then finally, the somewhat unclassifiable, such as the good dr. om, noisemusick, the 76 synth, or the moog filtatron – any number of oddballs “fit”, more or less, into this third category.

in category one, some stunning advances have been made, and in the case of a keyboard-based synth like the mighty thor – well, this synth is almost a textbook case for how to build a perfect synth in ios – it’s just a dream to play, it sounds great, it looks great, and the developers deserve a huge pat on the back for what they’ve done with thor – it’s really incredible.  if I want the best in a keyboard-based ios synth, I almost always turn to thor or nave, nave or thor, or let’s not forget the redoubtable iMini.

while I might go for one of those first, depending on the requirement, for another session, on another night – I might go for animoog (which has become quite the synth now that you can get the richard devine and other nice sound libraries for it, the metallic library is also fabulous) – so that’s a synth that has improved with the addition of new libraries, although of course, you do have to pay for them – or I might choose one of the korgs, or addictive synth, or cassini, or xenon or sunrizer.  or let us not forget the mighty n log pro – a fantastic first generation synth.

I’ve been less impressed with the progress of category two and three synths, that is, until I decided to take advantage of a rare price reduction on the TC-11 synth a few days ago – and suddenly, all these attempts to use the massive screen of the ipad in a unique and unusual, yet totally functional and musical way – well, it all starts to make sense now!  the designers / developers of TC-11 has done what the sound prisms and mugicians and the cantors could not quite do – they’ve created a synth with no keyboard, that is actually playable; that challenges the very need for a standard keyboard, and I found today, in making some test recordings, that it is entirely possible to play music with the TC-11 – despite the lack of a keyboard.

so the claim on the itunes store that the TC-11 synth is “the only fully programmable multi-touch synthesizer for the iPad” – would actually seem to be true! – I’ve certainly never encountered any other ios synth with the level of “under the hood” control that the TC-11 gives you.

the key is that there is no one solution, there isn’t one static screen (as there is with sound prism pro, mugician, cantor, and so on) instead, there is a different screen for each preset!  and each patch is totally configurable, from the oscillators to the filters to sequencers to the effects to determining how the movement of your fingers affects auto-panning, total behind-the-scenes control.

I actually bought this synth thinking “OK, I am a guitarist, and I have a lot to learn about synthesis still, despite playing and working with them for more than a few decades; I will buy this, and I will sit down at some far future point, many months from now, and try to teach myself how to program it…”  I expected it to be beyond me – and am pleasantly surprised to find that really, it’s not.

within seconds, I was playing, within minutes, music was emerging, even before I really understood what is going on with this remarkable synthesis engine, which is utterly and so beautifully configurable, you have access to everything under the hood, and I do mean everything – and this synth has just about everything you could ever, ever want – you are in control!

like any good ios synth, of course, it comes stocked with a healthy dose of presets; and from examining the way those are designed, I can begin to make my own connections and alterations and create fantastic patches of my own.  I actually didn’t expect presets, I thought I would have to build all of my own, but the developer has spent some serious time and effort to give us some absolutely great sounding presets right out of the box – which also work as building blocks for sounds of our own that we will design later…did I mention that the synth comes with a fantastic set of presets?

when you play through some of the presets, you will see that not one, but several different screen configurations are used, based on various different geometrical shapes – commonly, a circular interface; fret like interfaces; and various alternate versions of several basic screens, none of them featuring a key of any size or shape! nary a white key or black note in sight – and that, in the case of the TC-11, is a good thing.

despite the lack of a keyboard, there is a somehow-obvious logic (that I can’t describe in words) and when you play each patch, well, sometimes, it just hits you how you should use your fingers, you might make a fist to create a really pure chord, or stretch two notes far apart to increase that amazing thick flanger – but the design of even these presets is incredibly complex, and you can get amazing and very musical results by variously:

• making a swirling circle with one or two or three fingers
• putting all five or all ten fingers down in a semicircle
• making a fist in the centre of the screen, and spinning it slowly around
• trailing a single finger from one corner of the screen to another corner
• tapping out individual notes just as if you had a keyboard, but – you don’t
• moving the entire ipad in various directions to effect the sound as you hold fingers on the screen
• playing the screen like a typewriter
• any combination of the above
• using your imagination – just try it…and hear what it does to the sound !!!

…in other words, almost any gesture that you can imagine, made with finger, fingers, the fingers of two hands, the backs or sides of your hands…will produce a distinct result within the parameters of that patch, and some of the effects are extreme and wonderful – especially in the world of auto-panning, a lot of work has gone into the panner, not to mention some beautiful delays and flangers, too.

I imagine that you could put your forehead down on the screen, and something beautiful would come out of the TC-11. 🙂

so now – what I suddenly have here, is a superlative touch control interface synth that I can already play.  with some rehearsal, and some knowledge of how to get the best out of some of the best presets, and I should be able to play it live, anywhere, without issues.  so when I want to move from playing thor, and the world of the black and white, the tradition, playing those 88s in which ever mode I find them on whichever category one synth I am playing…

…to the world of total freedom, where one patch is all about circles and chords, another, about fretless dub bass with sonic qualities you will not believe, the next, an abstract plane of rectangles that fades into the top of the screen in an endless, fading curve, which defines your “playing field” for the next patch – it’s fantastic, a fantastical world of sound that is one of the most exciting I’ve heard, touched and seen, in a long time – the TC-11 is the real deal.

playing it is very, very liberating, the only experience I can compare it to, was when I first got my korg kaossilator, and I realised that after forty some years of making music with either frets, or keys – that I could make GOOD MUSIC without the benefit of keys or frets – well, it’s a similar feeling – and a wonderful, freeing one I can tell you.

I can make that comparison easily, because when I started out with the koass pad, I had no idea what would happen, and to my everlasting astonishment, with one day of practice – I could make music – without those pesky keys or frets or strings!

same thing with the TC-11 – within minutes, I could make music, even though the interface was completely alien to me, after a few minutes, I could begin to pull tunes out of it – which surprised the heck out of me, because with other category two and three synths, like sound prism – OK, you can get some nice chords and melodies out of sound prism – but you don’t get what you get with the TC-11 – beautiful, rich, synth music – with a really, truly unique playing surface, which is really, really fun to play – with a beautiful synthesis engine powering it, giving you the power to configure each patch to suit the way you want to move your fingers, to create the sounds you want to hear when you use that patch – total control, including the playing surface.

and, with the total configurability of the TC-11, even the most demanding, experienced synthesist should find the kind of control they crave for their patches – total control,  and playing without keys, finally got truly do-able.

so if you enjoy the challenge of playing the synthesizer without a keyboard, using a variety of approaches for note and chord generation, and you want a totally configurable synth with a powerful engine that you can tweak to your heart’s delight – then the TC-11 is the category two synth for you!  give it a try – I am finding it to be very, very addictive – it’s just a LOT of fun to play, and trying out different gestures to see what sound will result is a real hoot, and sometimes a new gesture will bring out an amazing sound out of a patch you thought you knew everything about – it’s full of surprises.

I took a bit of a risk in purchasing this, thinking it was far beyond me, but that risk has been rewarded a thousandfold, and what I have with the TC-11 is a fantastic tool for both live performance and recording – and a tool I know I will make a lot of use of in the years to come.  the TC-11 is a winner with me – a real winner.

you may want to give it a try – I am so, so glad that I decided to give it a go – because boy does it ever go! 🙂

the return of drone forest

I was pleasantly surprised to find that my old friend and partner in musical crime, ian stewart, has just created and posted onto you tube, some lovely long form drone forest videos (each running about 29 minutes and change) – four of them, to be exact, released on ian’s you tube channel just last month (june 2013).

I first ran into ian stewart via his excellent music mag “autoreverse”, and ian did some features on my mid-90s ambient and crafty output, and over time, we became friends.  he has also done a couple of in depth interview with me over time – one, back in 1995, reprinted here from autoreverse, and the other, quite recently – again, from autoreverse – 2011 version.

ian is an incredibly creative person, plays a number of instruments, and has a wonderful band called “devilcake” – a metal band – whose songs are exclusively about food, and another band called samarkand…he’s a fellow fan of XTC and king crimson, and is one of those people I’m always happy to work with.

one day, quite a number of years ago now, ian asked me if I would record some material for him on guitar, but he posed a really, really curious and difficult challenge:  he wanted pieces of music, but, critically, they were to have no melody and no beat – just texture.

so a few days after receiving this request (and, scratching my head a bit in terms of, how exactly will I do this?), I set up my guitar system, and started recording pieces of guitar “texture”.  I actually found this really quite difficult to do, because of the no melody rule in particular!   but, using stompboxes and my trusty ebows and some just plain strange, strange techniques, I produced quite a large “library” of these textural guitar sounds (probably more than an hour’s worth – I remember it took two cds to capture them all – maybe 25 tracks or more – I will have to locate the original discs to be able to say definitively how many tracks / how much time there was there).  I then mailed them away to ian – and promptly forgot all about it.

ian had never really said why he wanted the sounds, when I asked him about it, he would mumble something about a project of his, so I just put the whole thing out of my mind, and carried on with my life.

a few months later, out of the clear blue sky, a cd arrived in the post from ian, bearing the band name drone forest, entitled “drone forest”, which, apparently, was a new band, featuring ian c. stewart, c. reider, mike bowman, and…myself !!! I couldn’t believe it – here was a cd I was playing on, that I didn’t know existed, that I didn’t know was being made – I put the disc on, and sat there in an astonished state – and there were those textural guitar sounds of mine, recorded perhaps four months previously and then promptly forgotten –  expertly mixed in with sounds produced by the other three musicians (none of whom I had ever met, although I knew of c. reider because he’d reviewed one of my albums for…none other than ian’s “autoreverse” magazine!).

sitting there, hearing this cd, and realising what ian had done – he’d basically asked the same of both chris and mike, solicited material – they duly recorded sounds with no melody and no beat (a difficult task in particular for mike, who is a visual artist first; a drummer second, and a great guitarist/multi-instrumentalist – with his main instrument at the time being drums…the “no beat” rule must have been extremely challenging!) – but, all of the samples were superb, and ian had done an amazing job, creating several unique songs for the album which is known as “drone forest I” or simply “df1” – the first of many, many cds to come.

“drone forest II” followed hot on the heels of the first album, and after that, the albums started flowing so quickly that we couldn’t really believe it – we very quickly worked out a way of working:

1) we formed a yahoo “group”, and we all uploaded our self-created audio samples to our “sample pool”

2) we then would listen to and download the samples that the others had uploaded, picking what we liked, ignoring what we didn’t like

3) these then became the source material for new “drones”, which we each made many of, using whatever music software we favoured at the time

4) sound stretching, speeding up, slowing down, crushing, distorting, flanging, delaying, echoing, cutting, reversing, phasing, reverbing, mixing, contorting, convoluting – anything and everything went, any source files, mixed any way – as long as the end result sounded…like a drone.

a furious year of work, 2003, saw us so exhausted from the speed and quantity of creation, that we just sort of…stopped working.  leaving a massive trail of really, really interesting and innovative drone cds in our wake.  a while into the project, we decided that we would each produce a cd, instead of creating tracks and then picking a few from each member as we did originally, so I set off to produce “my” drone forest project, which is entitled “ZOSO” – the supposed “name” of led zeppelin‘s fourth album (although the music has nothing to do with led zeppelin – I just fancied calling it that, and that was that) – and each of the other members produced their own vision of drone forest – so all of these approaches, all of these amazing ideas were just flowing and it was a really fabulous and truly exciting time.

I am not exactly certain of the numbers, but I believe that in the first year, 2003, we produced eight cds – and then again, in the second working period, 2006 (which spilled over into the first part of 2007, to be fair), we also produced eight cds and then, chris produced a lovely piece of vinyl entitled “amy’s arms” right near the end – as well as two “posthumous” cds as well – for a total of 19 releases.

we’d invented a sort of  “bastard son of ambient” genre, the “drone” – along with several hundred other artists and bands, probably, but the quantity and quality of the drone forest catalogue cannot be underestimated.  sure, others before and after us, have claimed to invent the drone, but I think ian’s “drone supergroup” idea was a first – and his methods of working are unique and unrepeatable – brilliant thinking.

ian, as the godfather and founder of drone forest, embarked on a number of really, really interesting drone projects, including but not limited to a project where he created 100 one hour long drones (these were amazing, I never even heard them all, I probably have about a third of them), I think only ian has them all.  in any case, he developed a really clever and remarkable way to create these drones, for the 100 drones project (which was called “megadrone” I think – not quite sure) – he would create a short drone in the usual way, using different source files, he would build it to a particular length, five minutes or seven minutes or whatever it was (he had calculated this out) – and then, once happy with the short drone, he would “stretch” the track to one hour – and whatever the outcome – that was the drone.

remarkably, using this very strange and quite random technique – the resulting drones were – surprisingly – very consistent, and, they sounded great, and were perfect to listen to – equal in every way to drones that I had spent hours carefully concocting in cool edit pro multi-track!!  so he could produce a one hour drone, using a seven minute starting track – just by pushing a button.  this allowed him to work very, very quickly – to create a massive body of work – 100 hours – using a formulaic method that is truly inspiring.  I worked far too hard on my drones – ian just did it the easy way – and the results speak for themselves – really beautiful work.  what is perhaps most fascinating about this is, is that it demonstrates that the creation method of a drone can be almost anything – I spent hours meticulously building multi track drones, whereas ian just pushed the button – but both methods, along with whatever methods mike and c were employing – ALL methods produced beautiful, quality drones. it’s uncanny, really.

each of us worked in a different way; each of us favoured different software for the squashing, crushing, stretching and other audio atrocities that were committed in the name of drone creation – yet, when you put together an album with say, two tracks from each of us – there would be no way to tell “whose” track it was, because they came out remarkably consistently!  it really was quite something – mike, as a drummer, would make his drones the way he made them, c.,who is primarily a vocalist, would make his drones the way he made them, I would make my drones as if they were songs, but intentionally working towards a dronelike sound – and ian, well, ian was the master, really, he could make these “push button” drones, sure, but he was also the guy who put together that astounding first album – still one of my very favourite records from that period.

time passed, and for some reason, in 2006/2007, this time driven more by c., who in the meantime had built up the very, very cool drone forest website – we started recording again (quite suddenly, we just…started up again, as if three years hadn’t just passed with almost no band activity), and we created another large batch of records during another intense year-and-a-bit of drone creation.  I should mention that c. is the champion of all things netlabel, and on his netlabel site, you can download lots and lots of not just his music, but music by other netlabel artists, including compilations and collaborations galore – a fabulous netlabel resource.

and then…we stopped again – this time, for good – mike was busy starting a new family, and always busy with his art work – and his music (see velveeta heartbreak – this man is an incredibly talented artist and musician!) – I was busy with guitar craft, bindlestiff and my own solo records, and c. carried on his own solo work, on his label vuzhmusic – as well as being the caretaker of the drone forest website and being it’s main builder and webmaster.

ian carried on with his “megadrone” drone projects, and others, and also continued to work with his two bands, samarkand and “devilcake”, as well as going on to run the internet version of autoreverse, and also, his own bizarre depiction label.

but – there is so, so much drone music that has never been released – ian was far, far more prolific than any of us, and while we all gradually returned to our normal lives after the ’06/’07 round, ian continued with the “mega” and other drone projects – which really should have been released – as they were the some of the best – really remarkable stuff.

ian did produce an ultra-rare, 10-cd set of one of his unreleased projects – “metadrone” (which has the cryptic title “df8” on the actual package, and ian sent one to each band member – I am the proud owner of number 10/10 of “metadrone”, and also, a very proud owner of the vinyl record that chris produced, “amy’s arms”).  luckily, you can now download “metadrone” for free from the drone forest web site, while c’s vinyl release is still available for purchase as far as I know.

if we now fast forward to june 2013 – ian has (apparently, as I had no warning or inkling of these new recordings’ existence until today, when they appeared as suggestions on my you tube page!!) taken the original source tapes (I assume, from myself, mike and chris – and himself) and created new random audio mixes, one each for his four 29 minute long videos, using the original “drone forest I” source materials.  this is exactly the kind of thing that ian excels at, and I am so, so pleased to see these “new” videos, along with the first brand new drone forest music since 2007 (that I am aware of, anyway!).

what a pleasure and a privilege to be involved in a project like “drone forest” – an internet band, but an internet band like no other – working with three of the most creative people I’ve ever had the pleasure to know and to work with, and it’s with an incredible fondness that I think back on those two-and-a-bit remarkable years of creation, and, the massive catalogue of music we produced – which, by the way, you can download every single album and track for free at www.droneforest.com (with the one exception of the “amy’s arms” vinyl release, which is a for sale item as it is in vinyl format) – otherwise, all of the other tracks, 16 original cds and 2 posthumous cds, are free to download!!! free.

for me – well, what an absolute joy the entire drone forest experience was – and is, because right now, I am sat listening to four brand new, 29 minute long drone forest tracks – probably recorded in some very unusual way by the most excellent ian c. stewart – all hail the master of drones ! these new pieces are intriguing, dark, and most, most excellent – drones 2013 style.

you can view the entire discography on the drone forest website – we created 16 cds in our main heyday of 2003/then 2006-2007, plus the “amy’s arms” vinyl release makes it a nice round seventeen (my lucky number)  – and two “posthumous” cds.  in looking at the discography just now, I noticed that there are actually two of the drone forest cds that I produced, in 2003, it was the aforementioned “ZOSO”, but in 2006-2007, at the end of the second run of albums, I did a second production job on the final cd released by the group as a whole, “spatial displacement”.  in a way, I’m pleased that I was the one to master and produce our final album as a band – followed by the swan song – c. reider’s most excellent “amy’s arms” making it seventeen releases in total during our active lifetime as a band.

I think it’s more than fitting that exactly ten years after the release of “drone forest I”, that it’s creator has seen fit to create four brand new works from the band, here and now in 2013, but, using the ten year old samples – randomly re-arranging them into these there wonderful new pieces of music – I think that is brilliant !

if you are interested in drones, which, after all, are a sort of bastard son or offspring of ambient music, I would suggest a visit to the drone forest website, download an album or three or five or nineteen, and you might find you have a new love – the drone.  drones can be dark, disturbing, momentarily uplifting, disorienting, wonderful, moving, annoying or just downright cool, but, as an unusual offshoot of the ambient genre, once you start listening…you may find them very compelling indeed – I just listened to two full hours of brand new drone forest music, and it was absolutely captivating, relaxing, exhilarating – a great listening experience.

here are direct links to the four brand new drone forest videos, on the ian stewart you tube page:

drone forest video 1

drone forest video 2

drone forest video 3

drone forest video 4

ian also produced a short form drone forest video in 2009, which is here.

in listening to the new tracks tonight, I really find the to be most excellent – an updated, remixed, powered up version of the drone, set to ambient videos of – what else – trees, forests, snowstorms…the 2013 version of what we did so well back in 2003 and 2006/2007 – re-imagined for the 10s by none other than the drone master himself, ian c. stewart.

all hail indeed!

the drone forest discography:

title  /  assembled by

drone forest / ian c. stewart

drone forest II / ian c. stewart

our ghost in her wood / c. reider

june 21, 2003 / c. reider (a live simultaneous one hour event from four studios)

ZOSO / dave stafford

airways nova teeth / mike bowman

remixes, volume I / ian c. stewart

metadrone / ian c. stewart (original release, handmade, hand painted limited numbered edition 10 cd set)

drone forest IV / compilation – assembled by the band

remixes, volume II / the band

kirchenkampf vs. drone forest / john gore – guest assembler – drone forest source material

biolegacy / ian c. stewart (original release, handmade, limited numbered edition 3″ cdr 10 copies)

point / c. reider

honey / ian c. stewart

wormwood / c. reider

spatial displacement / dave stafford

amy’s arms (12″ vinyl release) / c. reider

forester / c. reider (posthumous release – the entire DF catalogue to date, put through an audio mulcher)

distinguish / to be determined (posthumous release)

I’ve been in some unusual bands before, from the dozey lumps to bindlestiff to the orchestra of crafty guitarists, but there has never been another band quite like drone forest.  go have a listen!

in search of…a few good sounds

today’s modern electric guitarists have the opposite problem to that faced by the pioneering rock guitarists of the 1960s.

in the 1960s, guitarists had a very, very limited palette of guitar effects.  I was just reading a list of the equipment that jimi hendrix used at the very famous 1969 woodstock performance – and when you look at it:

fender stratocaster guitar

wah-wah pedal

arbiter fuzz face

uni-vibe  (simulated rotating “leslie” organ speaker)

marshall amplifier

4 speaker cabinets

that was literally ALL that hendrix had, with which to create songs from across his catalogue…from purple haze to the star-spangled banner – not much in the way of sonic choices, although in that case, hendrix made the most of the pickup selectors and whammy bar on his beautiful white stratocaster, too (and his manual dexterity, and the amazing things that he did with his hands, on guitar body, strings, bridge, neck, and head stock – remain unrivalled as the most unique technique ever invented – often copied, never equalled) – coupled with his skill on the wah-wah pedal, that whammy/feedback/wah combination was the screaming metal fire music of it’s day.

hendrix and other guitarists performed miracles with just a wah-wah and a fuzz, one of my other favourite live records from 1969 is the recently-released “the move live at the fillmore 1969” which features roy wood playing both six string and twelve string electric guitars through wah or distortion, and coaxing a lot of great guitar tone out of his set up (whatever that was!) – this article suggests that it might be a fender guitar through a vox amp with a binson echo…

while much amazing music WAS made with these simple tools, over time, even 60s guitar legends like frank zappa, todd rundgren, robert fripp and so on, began to use and become used to using, and having available, an ever-growing, ever more bewildering selection of effects pedals – at first, better distortion pedals, then, chorus pedals, then flangers,  phase shifters, reverbs, delays, and starting in the early 70s, an absolutely astonishing array of truly bizarre sounding effects – envelope filters and followers, micro synthesizers, loopers, as well as devices such as the gizmo and the ebow…

today’s guitarists – have too many options.  too many effects.  too many choices…

I started playing guitar in the 60s, too, but not seriously until I was a little older, and it was not until the 1970s that I got really serious about being a lead guitarist, and like all my 1960s guitar heros, I had the same kit: fuzz face fuzz box (because that’s what jimi hendrix used) wah-wah pedal (because that’s what hendrix used) and later, for a while, I had an echoplex – the tape kind – an amazing piece of kit.

for  a long time, that was really all I had, although when boss started making good sounding chorus, flanger, reverb, delay, etc pedals I collected a lot of those – sold some of them, re-bought them a few generations later, and so on – nice little stomp boxes, small, and reasonably good sounding.

then came the era of the rack mount.  stomp boxes fell by the wayside, in their place, shiny new rack-mountable devices, in my case, I favoured digitech so I had a nice 24 bit reverb, the tsr-24s; I had a digitech 8 second delay (the longest delay/looper I could afford at the time); and later, I bought robert fripp’s old roland GP-16 to use as my first rack multi-effects unit, and later still, I got the oberheim echoplex pro (the digital version, this time).

fast forward another 20 years, and the list of pedals and rack devices and miracle hybrid stomp boxes, and multi-effects devices just grows and grows, until you have so much choice that it’s nearly impossible to figure out what combinations of what devices, coupled with what input device – guitar, or guitar synth, or keyboard, or kaossilator, or ipad…to use to achieve what sound.  and then – for recording – record with effects, or add them later…or some of both?

the choices…the sheer number of choices, is staggering.  let’s say I have 17 devices in my arsenal of effects.  that means…they can be set up in a nearly infinite number of ways, pre- or -post, used as you play, or “re-amped” through them later – we are truly spoiled for choice.

the natural tendency, if you come from the wah/fuzz/echo background that I do, was at first, to try and get as many sounds as possible, by having every pedal that made a different sound added to your pedal board. I spent years and years designing and building ever more grand pedal boards, sometimes I used two pedal boards – whatever it took –  but then, technology progressed yet again – we started to have “multi-effects” devices, and modelled guitar amps (like the sans amp), and so on – which made the choices even more confusing…

and then – do you just set up each song free-form, by reaching down and making changes, or do you control everything – or just PART of your system -with a MIDI controller?  all of these questions, have to be worked out…answered, solved, tested, tried…

I’ve been playing electric guitar for 41 years now, and in that time, while I do now have a lot of really beautiful sounds and instrument sources to choose from, and it’s still very tempting to set up these multiple-choice, multiple-path set-ups that allow you to change effortlessly between a number of different instruments, chains of effects, or rack devices…and yes, that’s fantastic technology;  and with it, you can do so, so much…

but lately, I’ve decided that I am going to attempt to apply what I call “the eno principle” to this massive array of rack, stomp and other effects devices (including, soft synths, ipad synths, software effects, and everything else in my current set up)…”the eno principle” being simply: find a few REALLY GOOD SOUNDS and use those, and…ignore the rest.  in other words, life is too short to use a crappy sounding patch!

eno originally gave this advice about synthesizers…when the first truly beautiful synths, like the yamaha dx7, came along, eno commented on the fact that they all had a very few REALLY BEAUTIFUL or really interesting sounds…and most of the rest of the sounds, were not all that good – and the secret was just to use those  good sounds, and ignore the rest.

well, here it is, 2013, and I am now applying this same principle to my current guitar system.  I have lots of sound generating devices: guitar, guitar synth, keyboard, kaossilator, and ipad (which in itself, contains many, many unique synths, as well as guitar processing gear) – and lots of fabulous effects devices that 41 years ago, if you had told me I would have in the future, I would have just laughed at you – but, now I do have them, and they are incredible…but my thought now is, I need to examine each device; figure out what it’s best 10 or 15 sounds are (as eno did with his yamaha dx7), and stick with those, and not waste time with any sound that is less than incredibly beautiful, or incredibly interesting, or incredibly powerful.  this seems to me now, after 41 years, like a sensible approach.  a more sensible approach, than having more possible sounds than I can possibly remember, much less actually use…

so I am thinking in “patches” again, but patches that are not complete patches – they are patches of “post” effects only…so – harmony, delay, reverb.  the input, instrument, and basic sound – clean, distorted, etc. I will still select manually each time – with the processing, or treatments, handled by patches.  via a MIDI controller of some sort – an as yet undetermined controller.

the input can still be anything – and with the roland gr-55 guitar synth, that is so true – it might be a flute, or a clarinet, or a xylophone, or a strange hybrid synth voice of some odd description – or just an ordinary electric guitar sound.  but that input – will be processed, in the near future, with very, very carefully chosen “presets” of harmoniser, delay, and reverb.

so I am hopeful that with a few months work, I can document and “work out” what the best sounds are on each device, then (and this is the tricky part) try to marry up the perfect harmony with the perfect reverb, and know what delay works with that perfect harmony / reverb combination…

for me – music is just as much about the treatments, about what you do to the sound, as it is generating the sound.  they are of equal importance.

but now, I want to concentrate on what the very best of those “treatments” are, selecting and blending only the very best sounds, so that my oboe sounds unlike any one else’s oboe: partially, because of the way I play it, but also, because of the way I process, or treat, the sound as I perform.  that is the goal – to sound unique, unusual, but beautiful 🙂

over the next several months, I will be working on these high quality, hybrid, “best of”, “eno principle” sounds, and once I have a decent selection of them completed, I can begin to use them on recordings and live video performances.

so I am hoping to have a smaller selection, fewer sonic choices, using fewer sounds, but – sounding better than having too, too many choices, which perhaps dilutes things too much – too many wildly varying effects, instead of going for what is the most interesting, the most beautiful, the best – and, with ambient music, and even in rock music – sometimes – less is more.

since this will be an ongoing process, I will return to the topic in future blogs over the next couple of years, to see what progress I am making – it will take time, but I feel that it’s well worth the effort – even if I only come up with 20 or 30 basic sounds or “patches”…if they are superior, and they bring new sonic qualities to my playing – then I will consider that a success…hell, I’d be happy with 17 really fantastic sounds 🙂

I don’t really “need” a lot more, if they sound truly amazing.

so, it follows then, that they need to sound truly amazing 🙂

the return of adobe audition / guitar synth sessions

over the past few days, I’ve been involved in mixing tracks from a live improv guitar synth session recorded way back on february 26, 2012, and it’s been a challenging and interesting session indeed.

first of all, I am using a different tool for the final mixes, a tool I’ve used before, but now, I am sure that I will eventually invest in, instead of trialling it, and that is adobe audition 5.5.

when cool edit pro disappeared way back when, i’d heard vaguely that it had been taken over by adobe, and that’s welcome news, but I didn’t really mean to wait ten years to check out what adobe had done with the cool edit pro code…but basically, that’s what happened.  I’ve been “making do” with other audio tools in the interim, sonar, sony sound forge, t-racks 3, and so on – so imagine my astonishment then, at seeing just how very far the original excellent ideas that cool edit pro espoused, have been carried through, brought up to date, and even into the future, by adobe with audition.

for audio – this is just heaven.  for the first time since the cool edit pro days, I can do noise reduction properly – fft style! – by taking a sample of the noise I want rid of, and then applying that to the track or section I want to clean.  there were some strange residual artefacts in some silences in take 9, the take I’m currently working on – and audition’s fft-style noise reduction cleaned them perfectly.

then there is the amazingly efficient pop removal tool, the “auto healing” brush.  I’ve tried a lot of different methods of removing pops and clicks over the years – and this one actually works.  it takes a bit of practice, but if you are careful, you can totally remove every pop and click without any damage to the actual music.  it’s a visual system, and it works really, really well.

for just those two practical, sensible tools, I am already sold, but then last night, I was trialling many, many echoes, delays and reverbs in the tool – and for built in effects, they are just outstanding.  I’d also already had a really positive experience using audition during the final mastering of “gone native” – using it to measure the effective levels, using the really sophisticated and most excellent analysis tools, so I could gauge the best levels for the tracks on the record – that was an invaluable help at the time.

not to mention, multiple levels of selectable undo – listed right there for you to choose from.  brilliant!

I still have a couple of sessions that have disastrous pops in them, which I never had time to cleanse when I had the trial of audition earlier this year, so for me, just for the effective pop removal tool, it’s a no-brainer.  but it’s also a great, great tool for editing audio, making mp3s, etc. – it pretty much does it all.

this is the first time in a long time that I’ve mixed something outside of sonar, and I wasn’t really missing anything, sonar does have some nice plug ins, but from what I understand, audition supports vst as well, so I am going to be trying out breeze and my mellotron and so on to see how audition does with them – watch this space.

I could also switch to a hybrid scenario, where I record in sonar, apply any plug-ins or reverbs I need, deal with any midi tracks, and once I have a decent sub-mix, send it to audition (which I can actually, probably, just call from sonar – so no need to export!) for final touches.

I got excellent results, and in fact, I ended up doing two additional mixes of take 9, to test out the effect of different delays and levels of reverb on the track, and in listening to the mixes today, it’s done a great job – I am particularly pleased with how well the fft style noise reduction cleaned up those strange noises in the silences, that is fabulous, that was something I loved about cool edit pro, and in fact, back in the day, most of what I was doing was converting master reel to reel tapes of either dave stafford solo albums, or bindlestiff/band albums, to digital, the very first thing I would have to do would be take noise samples (I ended up with a big library of fft files by the time I was done!) and noise reduce the entire master just to get rid of all the hiss and noise from the tape…and it worked beautifully.

so to finally have that tool back, configured the way I prefer (even better, now) is invaluable to me, and, with all the unfortunate popping that I’ve  been cursed with this year in particular, on sessions that are very important to me, I am equally enamoured of the most excellent pop removal tool – I love it – I am absolutely loving adobe audition.

this will probably also mean that I don’t need to use sound forge any more, because from what I can tell, audition is superior in almost every department – including specialised, extensive analysis tools, another huge plus in my book.  I also love the little “instant level” adjuster, a tiny digital potentiometer that hovers in every track, and you can instantly raise or lower the level in db for any section or the whole piece on the fly – a little too quiet?  tweak the pot, and it ups the level, and saves the file – all without bothering you.  that’s a brilliant idea, leaving me free to get on with the work – no dialogue necessary for this most basic of functions!  excellent.

anyway, the track I’m working with had quite a few challenges, I feel it’s an interesting track, it’s certainly imperfect, as improvs often are, so I used the tools in audition to try and improve the parts of the song that I felt were not 100% up to scratch, and mostly, what I’ve  done has really, really helped the track a lot.

I had originally intended only to release one improv from this session, take 10, which is now retitled “extreme gradient” but I went back and listened to the entire session, and the somewhat raw take 9 – which has now been retitled “provide the spark” – leapt out at me as being a strong contender – because of a unique and bizarre accidental “introduction”.

a fragment of a loop got caught in the looper, so this was a short sound, with a gap in between it, a short duration event in a short loop.  it was playing along, so I just let it play, and instead of clearing the loop and starting the take, for some strange reason (none of the other 17 takes have this intro) I decided to just overdub this running loop, and then launch into the song proper.

so as this short sound was repeating, I started inserting short bursts of guitar synth, two notes, one note, on top of it, in successive iterations, and very quickly built up a strange, strange “mini-loop”, with a gap in between, that continued to repeat right up until the point, about a minute and a half or so into the piece, where I then started to play the main improv I was working on that day.

at first I thought, this is just too strange, I am not sure I can actually use this for a video, but as time went by, I “got used” to this strange introduction, so I decided to work up the track in a mix and see what I could do with it.  one aspect of the loop was that it went on a few bars longer than I would have wanted, so to try and add some variety, I used audition to add in a nice delay about half way through the iterations, and then a more extreme delay towards the end – I took a preset delay called “delicate whispering” and altered it to fit the time signature of the piece, eventually (after many attempts) getting the right delay sound – not too overbearing, but enough to differentiate the final iterations of the loop from the first ones – and I think I have succeeded.

as often happens with loops, they can sometimes grow too loud too quickly, so again, I was able to “grab” sets of iterations, and selectively lower their levels (by grabbing in the gaps around them) so that the whole level of the looped section became more even.

the final tweak came at the end of the song, where I originally meant to have a sort of xtc/”great fire” gradual move from dry to reverbed, but in the end, while I did do a variation of that, I actually reverbed different sections of the final guitar solo with different levels of reverb, which had the desired effect – again, trying to instill some variance in this section of the song, and sometimes a bit of reverb is just the thing.

so there is very dry guitar, very dry guitar synth, and then very wet guitar, and very wet guitar synth – lots of variations – which you kind of need on a track where basically, I am playing a lead solo throughout the track – without variations, without a bit of delay and reverb to break things up, it would have sounded like a four minute fifteen second guitar solo – prefaced by a long, strange loop. (of course, that is what it really is, but hey!) – I think I have altered it just enough to make it interesting, and improved it’s user-friendliness a hundredfold in the process…and that’s all thanks to audition, and a bit of creative thinking – and, the tool is so intuitive, so easy to use – of course, probably since it’s the descendent of cool edit pro, I still recognise it’s functions, but it’s so completely different from cool edit pro that actually, it’s almost unrecognisable as ever having anything to do with cool edit pro – stripped down, rebuilt from the ground up – as with many adobe products – this one oozes pure class.

having said all this, I still have a third option with this strange loop – to release the untreated version.  my main motivation for working on the alternate mixes of “provide the spark” was more about learning more about audition and what it can do, and I had a great time trialling various excellent echoes, delays, and reverbs – I had a blast, and it even boasts successive equalisation of repeats in some of the more complex echoes, delays and reverbs, not to mention – of course – 5.1 reverbs, which can be customised for the 5.1 environment! I’ve  never seen a 5.1 reverb until last night – wow!

so in listening this morning, I am comparing my original “dry” mix, which uses only the effects present in the live/looped performance (which were considerable, by the way), to two different alternate versions that had been noise reduced, levels adjusted, delays and reverbs added, and trying to decide what makes the most sense for the video.

after listening to all three mixes a few times this morning, my view so far is this:  it’s between the original untouched mix, and the second delay/reverb mix – the first delay/reverb mix has too heavy a delay on the last section of the loop.

I think in the end, I may start again with the untouched loop, and do just the noise reductions, and the level adjustments on the loop – and some very careful reverbs at the end – and see where that gets me.  if still not satisfied, I will then approach some kind of delay on the last parts of the loop, similar to the on in “version 3” that I am favouring at the moment.

I believe what this means is that, after two nights of work, that I am still not happy, and I want to take more time and see if I can get a “best of all worlds” mix – addressing the needs of the loop, and of the main track, effectively.  I am getting close, and these rough mixes are certainly helping me gauge what else I might need to try…

luckily, I now have a great tool on hand to mix with, well, I actually have several great tools, and that’s the beauty of having daw, you have lots of options – within sonar itself, I have so many mix options, so many plug ins, it’s not funny, and then on top of that, I have several external tools, of which audition is just one, to aid in getting the best sound possible…so I feel totally spoiled for choice.  I also have the t-racks system, which I have yet to explore…

audition is a definite new year purchase, meanwhile, I plan to use my current trial version for another few weeks to clean up some sessions that have been patiently waiting for me to do just that – in particular, a really good session with the ipad from april 7, 2012, demonstrating the amazing power of some of the synthesizer apps, ended up with a lot of pops due to a usb conflict, so I had to shelve several really promising tracks that should have been made into videos for the applicationhd channel – well, hopefully, if I can clean them up, they now eventually, better late than never, will be.  I really want to get those tracks out there as they are really remarkable, albeit currently spoiled by many, many pops. (note: in the interim, all of these tracks have been cleaned up and are now pop-less, and are ready to be released!).

this and another session (at least – probably more sessions that I don’t know about yet, as my backlog is still quite extensive at this point in time) are plagued by pops and clicks, and I am sure that here and there there will also be other clicks and pops, and if I end up buying audition, then I need never worry about that again – I have the perfect tool to sort those out (not to mention, I can use it on the audio from old tapes of every description, even vinyl noise – I can clean up anything with this suite of tools).

once I get back into digitizing tapes (a room full of cassettes and tapes awaits me, as always) that fft style noise reduction will also give me great value, so I can reduce noise and remove clicks and pops…

the current version of audition is pricey, yes, but to my mind, it’s worth it for the time and trouble it will save in cleaning up “difficult audio”.

and I seem to have rather a lot of that about the place.

 

while I certainly have no lack of music to work on, I will say, it’s remarkable to have such a capable and diverse tool set with which to restore and improve audio.  I am loving audition – in any of it’s versions, right back to it’s genesis as cool edit pro 🙂